Elizabeth Reagh is a California-based artist with a flair for utilizing unique and impactful linework and color combinations to help to bring a bit of life to the still life style she favors. Reagh currently resides in Sacramento, though she earned her B.A. from San Francisco State University and her M.A. from the University of Oregon, Eugine. Her primary medium is paint, though Reagh's black and white drawings showcase another side to her stunning artistic skill set. With a professional artistic presence that traces back to the early 2000s, the quality of Reagh's work has reached audiences far and wide and has been shown numerous times over the past two decades. Alongside creating and showing her own artwork, Reagh has also taught painting and drawing at the university level and, in doing so, has helped to bring artistic understanding to others.

Artist Statement:

Produced from 2021 to 2023, these works represent the artist’s response to a move from Brooklyn, NY (after 20 years) to Sacramento, CA, the concurrent onset of the Covid pandemic, and finally the return to relative normal-cy. The still life genre was a natural vehicle with which to explore the predictability and routine nature of the days in isolation. Out of these days a certain subject matter evolved: views, both inside and out, observed within the confines of the artist’s home and garage studio (“Spring Still Life”). The return to California inspired a shift from inventing light to capturing light from direct obseration, the particular California light Reagh, a native of Los Angeles grew up with.

As Covid has waned, Reagh has expanded her practice to include more invention of light and shadow (“Night Studio”), subject matter that reaches beyond the world of home (“The Tumbleweed Diaries”), and a focus on moving between formal and representational approaches in one painting (“HAP*Y”).

Central to Reagh’s work is a committment to avoiding sentimentality, pushing abstraction within representa-tional work, striving for “interesting” over “decorative” and making paintings that depict familiar imagery in an unconventional way.

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